The Girls of Atomic City

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Contents

Introduction

Principal Cast of Characters

Map—Clinton Engineer Works, Tennessee, 1943–1945

Revelation, August 1945

1:
EVERYTHING WILL BE TAKEN CARE OF
: TRAIN TO NOWHERE, AUGUST 1943

Tubealloy: The Bohemian Grove to the Appalachian Hills, September 1942

2: PEACHES AND PEARLS: THE TAKING OF SITE X, FALL 1942

Tubealloy: Ida and the Atom, 1934

3: THROUGH THE GATES: CLINTON ENGINEER WORKS, FALL 1943

Tubealloy: Lise and Fission, 1938

4: BULL PENS AND CREEPS: THE PROJECT’S WELCOME FOR NEW EMPLOYEES

Tubealloy: Leona and Success in Chicago, December 1942

5: ONLY TEMPORARY: SPRING INTO SUMMER, 1944

Tubealloy: The Quest for Product

6: TO WORK

Tubealloy: The Couriers

7: RHYTHMS OF LIFE

Tubealloy: Security, Censorship, and the Press

8: THE ONE ABOUT THE FIREFLIES . . .

Tubealloy: Pumpkins, Spies, and Chicken Soup, Fall 1944

9: THE UNSPOKEN: SWEETHEARTS AND SECRETS

Tubealloy: Combining Efforts in the New Year

10: CURIOSITY AND SILENCE

Tubealloy: The Project’s Crucial Spring

11: INNOCENCE LOST

Tubealloy: Hope and the Haberdasher, April–May 1945

12: SAND JUMPS IN THE DESERT, JULY 1945

13: THE GADGET REVEALED

14: DAWN OF A THOUSAND SUNS

15: LIFE IN THE NEW AGE

Epilogue

Photographs

Reading Group Guide

About Denise Kiernan

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

For Joe

Introduction

There have long been secrets buried deep in the southern Appalachians, covered in layers of shale and coal, lying beneath the ancient hills of the Cumberlands, and lurking in the shadow of the Smokies at the tail end of the mountainous spine that ripples down the East Coast. This land of the Cherokee gave way to treaties and settlers and land grants. Newcomers traversed the Cumberland Gap to establish small farms and big lives in a region where alternating ridges and valleys cradle newborn communities in the nooks and crannies of the earth. Isolated. Independent. Hidden.

In 1942, a new secret came to this part of the world. The earth trembled and shook and made way for an unprecedented alliance of military, industrial, and scientific forces, forces that combined to create the most powerful and controversial weapon known to mankind. This weapon released the power present in the great unseen of the time, unleashing the energy of the basic unit of matter known as the atom.

Author H. G. Wells might have called them Sun Snarers, the people who descended upon the valleys and ridges.

“And we know now that the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final and—lifeless—lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy . . . ,” Wells wrote in his 1914 book,
The World Set Free
. This lesser-known title by the
War of the Worlds
author describes the harnessing of the power of the nucleus: “And these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.”

Wells wrote this long before the neutron was discovered, let alone fission, and his work began to popularize the phrase “atomic bombs”
before those devices ever took form beyond the author’s pages. But years earlier, people in the mountains claim another prophet lay on the ground, overcome with visions of a project that would bring the snaring of the sun to the hills of Tennessee.

They say a prophet foretold it.

A general oversaw it.

And a team of the world’s greatest scientific minds was tasked with making it all come together.

But it was the others, the great and often unseen, who made the visions of the Prophet and the plans of the General and the theories of the scientists a reality. Tens of thousands of individuals—some still reeling from the Depression, others gripped by anxiety and fear as loved ones fought overseas in the most devastating war any of them had known—worked around the clock on this project, the details of which were not explained. For the young adventurers, male and female, who traveled to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II, doing their part meant living and working in a secret city, a place created from the ground up for one reason and one reason only—to enrich uranium for the world’s first atomic bomb used in combat.

Roots have always run deep here. They were dug up and scattered when the strangers with the project came to the foothills of the Cumberlands, but the newcomers, too, could not resist the pull of the earth and dug their own roots down deep into the Tennessee clay, soaked by mountain rain and baked by a thousand suns. Permanent. Enduring.

Many of these workers on this secret project hidden in the hills were young women who had left home to fight the war in their own way. They left farms for factories willingly, wrote letters hopefully, waited patiently and worked tirelessly.

A number of these women—and men—still live in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, today. I have had the fascinating and humbling privilege of meeting them, interviewing them, laughing and crying with them and hearing firsthand their tales of life in a secret city while working on a project whose objective was largely kept from them. Over the years they have graciously given me their time and suffered through repeated questions and what must have seemed like insane requests to recall moments from their day-to-day activities roughly 70 years ago. They did so happily and enthusiastically and never, ever with even the slightest bit of bravado. That is not their style. I did not only learn about life on the Manhattan Project. I also found myself taken aback by their sense of adventure and independence, their humility, and their dedication to the preservation of history. I wish I could include each and every one of them in these pages, but I cannot. I hope those who find themselves only in the acknowledgments will accept my thanks in place of my prose. I feel exceptionally lucky to know those who continue to live on, and miss those who have passed since I began working on this book.

Without them, this sun-snaring—this Manhattan Project—would not have achieved its objectives, and because of them a new age was born that would change the world forever.

These are some of their stories.

—Denise Kiernan,

summer 2012

Principal Cast of Characters

PEOPLE

(THE WOMEN, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)

Celia Szapka

A secretary transferred from the Manhattan Project’s original offices in New York City, Celia grew up in the coal-mining town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.

Toni Peters

A secretary from neighboring Clinton, Tennessee, Toni heard about the Project from its beginnings, when the government seized her aunt and uncle’s farm to make way for the secretive town.

Jane Greer

A statistician-mathematician from Paris, Tennessee, Jane oversaw a team of young women who crunched numbers around the clock to track the production rates of the Y-12 plant.

Kattie Strickland

A janitorial services worker from Auburn, Alabama, Kattie came to Oak Ridge with her husband to work at K-25.

Virginia Spivey

A chemist from Louisburg, North Carolina, Virginia came to Oak Ridge after graduating from the University of North Carolina. She worked in the chemical department of Y-12 analyzing product.

Colleen Rowan

A leak pipe inspector at the K-25 plant, Colleen left Nashville, Tennessee, for Oak Ridge, along with more than 10 members of her extended family.

Dorothy Jones

A calutron cubicle operator from Hornbeak, Tennessee, Dot was recruited right out of high school.

Helen Hall

A calutron cubicle operator and sports fanatic from Eagleville, Tennessee, Helen was recruited from the small coffee shop and pharmacy where she worked.

Rosemary Maiers

A nurse from Holy Cross, Iowa, Rosemary came to Oak Ridge to help open the very first clinic.

OTHER WOMEN OF NOTE

Vi Warren

A columnist for the
Oak Ridge Journal
and wife of the Project medical chief, Stafford Warren.

Ida Noddack

German geochemist who suggested the possibility of fission years before its discovery.

Lise Meitner

Austrian physicist who escaped Nazi Germany and was part of the team that discovered fission.

Leona Woods

American physicist who worked on the first-ever sustained nuclear reaction.

Mrs. H. K. Ferguson

Representing the H. K. Ferguson Company, principal contractor for the S-50 plant. Her real name shall be revealed. . . .

Joan Hinton

American physicist who worked with Enrico Fermi’s team at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Elizabeth Graves
American physicist who worked on the neutron reflector that surrounded the core of the Gadget.

PEOPLE (THE OTHERS)

The General

General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project.

The Scientist

Robert Oppenheimer, laboratory director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.”

The District Engineer, or The Engineer
Col. Kenneth Nichols, administrative head of the Manhattan Project.

The Secretary

Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

The Photographer

James Edward “Ed” Westcott, official photographer for Clinton Engineer Works (CEW) during World War II.

Eric Clarke

Chief psychiatrist for the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge.

Ebb Cade

A construction worker at K-25.

Stafford Warren

Chief of the medical section of the Manhattan Project.

Enrico Fermi

Also known as Henry Farmer and the Italian Navigator. Italian physicist and head of the physics group at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory; assistant laboratory director at Los Alamos.

Ernest Lawrence

Also known as Ernest Lawson. American physicist who developed cyclotrons and calutrons for the electromagnetic separation process. Head of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory for the Manhattan Project.

Niels Bohr

Also known as Nicholas Baker. Danish physicist who contributed to the modern understanding of the structure of the atom and to the field of quantum mechanics.

Arthur Compton

Also known as Arthur Holly or Holly Compton or Comus. American physicist and head of the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory.